Earl Killian’s Recommended Books

Contents

These are the best books that I’ve read in the last few years and
which I heartily recommend if the subject interests you. The
Non-Fiction category contains books on Environment, History,
Social Issues, and U.S. politics. Science includes books
about Science for the lay reader. Fiction contains Science Fiction,
some classics, and some contemporary novels. The book reviews here
are a little short, I admit.

For some reason I haven’t added things to this page for a
while. You may want to check out the list of books I have
read recently and ask about them.

For convenience I’ve provided links to
Amazon.COM
in case you would like to look up the details or even
buy one of the books mentioned here.

Non-Fiction

The Best

Small Is Beautiful, Economics As If People Mattered
by E.F. Schumacher.

Schumacher was a British economist whose work included being
chief economic advisor to the UK National Coal
Board. Small Is Beautiful was published in 1973,
and identified early the unsustainability of the modern Western
world and made the critical observation that our natural
resources are capital, and that our apparent wealth is partially
based upon the spending of this inherited capital. He questions
the value of GNP as an economic measure. Finally Schumacher
looks at third-world economics and what we might learn there.
It was a ground-breaking work, and it remains relevant today.

Hawken and the Lovins’ present a vision of capitalism
transformed by treating our ecosystem as capital. From this
vantage, the destruction of natural resources becomes not
production, but the drawdown of assets, and thus uneconomic.
Capitalism based on this axiom leads to a different calculus
for production, industry, and consumers. For example,
natural resources might be rented instead of bought and
sold, and factors of ten in efficiency in the use of natural
resources would be encouraged and achieved. The authors
assert that this leap in efficiency is inevitable, and the
undertone is that those that realize this first and exploit
this potential will become the new industrial leaders.

Most of the book is in fact a litany of examples where
industry has achieved radical improvements (factors of four,
ten, or more) in the use of natural resources, resulting in
improvements to the bottom line.

Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon,
by Robert Fisk.

Fisk has lived in Beirut since 1976, during the PLO,
Syrian, and Israeli invasions, and witnessed them first-hand.
(That he is still alive is amazing.) He also was there for the
arrival of the US, France, and Italian peace keepers (the
“multi-national force”), their withdraw, followed by
the Israeli withdrawal, and the rise of Hezbollah. He was on
the scene of the US embassy, US Marine barracks, French
barracks, Shin Bet headquaters, and Hezbollah headquarters,
etc. bombings shortly after they happened. He was at Sabra,
Chatila and Qana massacres shortly after they occurred too. The
story of Terry Anderson’s kidnapping and release is also there
(Fisk and Anderson are close friends). There is a wealth of
information about the ways in which democracies, dictators,
guerrillas, and theocracies fight wars. Pity the Nation’s style
is pretty much to tell what happened and what he saw, and point
out the falsehoods in what the various sides said about those
same events. He’s not on one side or the other (he has equally
nasty things to say about Arafat, Sharon, and Assad, for
example).

Pity the Nation should be required reading for
those interested in foreign policy, especially in the U.S. state
department and the National Security Council, and the rest of
the White House. So far, much of the U.S. invasion and
occupation of Iraq appears to be following the pattern seen so
many times before in Lebanon. Will we never learn?

Mitchell and Schoeffel have taken the transcripts of a series of
teach-ins Chomsky gave in the 1990s and turned them into a book
on the way the political system works. The first goal of
someone navigating the political system, whether establishment
or anti-establishment, must be to understand the system, and
this book is an excellent source. The book is also very
accessible, being in a transcript of verbal answers to verbal
questions. At the same time, Chomsky’s answers have enormous
depth and breadth. Topics include the western media (and the
propaganda model from
Manufacturing Consent), the Vietnam
war, the Israel-Palestine conflict, U.S. policy in Central and
South America, East Timor, Pol Pot and Cambodia, Cuba, Operation
Mongoose, COINTELPRO, and so on. Almost anyone can gain new
insight into the history behind these events, as Chomsky refuses
to accept the convenients myths and explanations offered for
events, but instead often uses original sources or declassified
government material to understand the real workings of the
system.

Only occasionally does Chomsky delve into what alternatives
might be to the existing system; this is not a text for that.
He does offer several reassurances however that the efforts of
his audience have made a difference.

The Q&A format has been supplemented by extensive
online
footnotes (claimed to be longer than the book itself if
printed).

The Myth of the Liberal Media, by Edward Herman.

The title of this book does not do it justice.
Myth is really a wide-ranging second look at the
media (the first being Herman and Chomsky’s
Manufacturing Consent).
It details how western media act as pillars of support for the
elites of their countries, and therefore, by implication, are
not liberal. The book is filled with data, such as column
inches or story counts devoted to two topics being compared, and
the use of vocabulary for different topics. The message is
powerfully delivered in an engaging manner. I highly recommend
Herman’s book.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch.

This is a book that really makes you wonder about yourself.
It is more than a tale of genocide. It is more than a tale of
international complicity and cover-up. It is more than a
tale of the individuals that have tried and are trying to do the
right thing in the face of overwhelming odds. It is all of
those things, but it is also a simple story of discovery
told in the first person through his conversations with
the survivors, the génocidaires, and the rebel
commanders that liberated the country. Any other way of
telling this story would likely be too antiseptic.

That the genocide happened is enough to make us sick; that
it happened and we did nothing is inexcusable; that we did
nothing and stood in the way of those who would do something
and then protected the génocidaires is
utterly shameful. Whatever happened to the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide?
Whatever happened to “Never Again”?

The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, by Marjorie Spiegel.

This is a short book, but what an impact! I’ve abhorred
animal slavery for some time and even written about it on my
own, so perhaps it is unfair for me to praise this book
— its thesis being so aligned with my own thoughts —
but Spiegel’s essay on the parallels between nineteenth
century American slavery and modern animal slavery is so
well researched and presented that I am certain that even
animal slavery advocates will be forced to admit its worth,
if only they ever read it.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond.

The breadth of Diamond’s hypothesis and data to supprt it
is awesome, and yet it is convincing. To grossly oversimply,
Diamond explains how the differences between a multitude of
human populations can be primarily explained by geography
and plant and animal resources.

The Penguin Essays of George Orwell.

Orwell’s writing is a pleasure to read. The essays range
over subjects including literature, writing, war, politics,
antisemitism, Gandhi, experiences in Burma, and boyhood, but
with an emphasis on literature and writers. I enjoyed his
political and social commentary the best, including
Shooting an Elephant, The Lion and
Unicorn, Notes on Nationalism,
Politics and the English Language,
Writers and Leviathan, Antisemitism in
Britain. Still the literary essays are fun to read
as well (but I feel less able to pass judgement on them).
One in particular stands out. His essay Inside the
Whale manages to coherently drift in out of many
subjects, literary and otherwise, but begins and ends with
the work of author Henry Miller.

I bought this book at Crown books, but the ISBN and title
are unknown to U.S. booksellers, so perhaps it was imported
from the U.K. Therefore I cannot provide a link to a
U.S. source; the link below is to Amazon U.K.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn.

I read this book in college (long ago), but when I saw it in the
bookstore recently in a new edition, I immediately remembered the
pleasure I had in first reading it. Codebreakers is comprehensive
and it is fun; I can’t think of a better combination. The book
is probably not the best on newer cryptography; the original was
published in 1967 and the latest edition does not appear to cover
matters since then as well as it might. Still, as an overall
introduction to the history of cryptography, it is a classic.

Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, by Alan Weisman.

So many of the serious books I read bemoan the state of the world
(with reason), but this one offers a vision of how it could be.
Not a dream vision, but one rooted in the reality of a small
village in Columbia that has achieved the unbelievable. Perhaps
the author could have written a better book, but don’t let that
detract from the story he has to tell.

Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.

I knew that Silent Spring started the environmental
movement in the 1960’s just as The Jungle was
responsible for the regulation of the meat business early in
this century. I had decided to read it for its historical
value, but while reading, I realized first just why the book was
so important, and second that it was just as relevant today as
it was when it was written. Silent Spring changed
the course of history because it is so well researched and
written. It is technical while easy to read. And while most of
the chemicals mentioned in the book are now banned in the United
States (e.g. DDT), the problems and solutions that Carson wrote
about are still with us. We learned a little, but we haven’t
learned enough.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is from the
reaction to the book. As Albert Gore’s introduction points out,
Carson and her book met considerable resistance from those
profiting from the poisoning of our land and water. Major
chemical companies tried to suppress Silent Spring,
and when excerpts appeared in the The New Yorker, a
chorus of voices immediately accused Carson of being hysterical
and extremist — charges still heard today whenever anyone
questions those whose financial well-being depends on
maintaining the environmental status quo. Each time
Silent Spring recounted some dreadful incident and
industry reaction to it, I shuddered to think that’s exactly
what they say today about modern events.

The scope of Carson’s book is remarkable considering it predates
modern ecology. Countless examples illustrate Carson’s points
as she covers chemicals, the ecology of water, soil, plant,
birds, and mammals. The implications to human health are well
covered in a section that explains what and how pesticides do to
us. And finally Carson shows how pesticides often fail to
achieve their purpose, and how successful alternative approaches
can be.

Who Will Tell the People, The Betrayal of American Democracy, by William Greider.

This excellent book details what has gone wrong with
U.S. politics. It is an in-depth look at who has power and why.
It looks at both parties with a critical eye. It looks at the
failures of both Congress and the President, and examines why
corporations and lobbyists wield such control over our
politicians, our regulatory agencies, and our citizens. Other
sections look at why the press has ceased to be anything but a
mouthpiece for the power elites. While the story of the
legislation for sale may not seem surprising to the cynic, the
story of how laws are rewritten and not enforced by the
regulators and fixers is at least less familiar. Moreover
Greider has a prescription to heal our system, and it is a
surprising one. Don’t read this book if you are prone to
despair, but if there’s a chance it may spur you to action, then
buy a copy, read it, and do something!

Toxic Sludge is Good for You!: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.

This carefully researched book published by
Common Courage Press,
provides a brief history of the Public Relations (PR)
industry, and detail on their involvement in many contemporary
events, including the out-and-out lies used to incite our anger
toward Iraq after their invasion of Kuwait. Chapter One,
Burning Books Before They’re Printed, explains how
the Ketchum PR firm helped scuttle a ground-breaking
environmental book before it even went to press using spies and
dirty tricks on behalf of their client, the California Raisin
Advisory Board (creators of the California Dancing Raisins).
Chapter Two, The Art of the Hustle and the Science of
Propaganda, talks about the early days of the PR
industry. Chapter Three, Smokers’ Hacks, explains
how the Tobacco industry has used PR. Chapter Four,
Spinning the Atom, covers the early successes and
later failures of the nuclear industry in using PR to lull the
public in complacency about the dangers of nuclear power. In
Chapter Five, Spies for Hire, we see that the
techniques the PR industry uses extend well beyond advertising
and include infiltration of their client’s opponents and the
staging of criminal activities to discredit them. Chapter Six,
Divide and Conquer, shows how corporations use PR
to make it appear they are good citizens when they are in fact
not. Chapter Seven, Poisoning the Grassroots,
explains how PR industry manufactures grass roots movements
(“astroturf”) on a moments notice to support their clients
positions. Chapter Eight, The Sludge Hits the Fan,
looks at the PR effort to use Toxic Sludge from waste treatment
plants as fertilizer for the crops we eat. In Chapter Nine,
Silencing Spring, we see the PR response to the
environmental movement (starting with the reaction to
Silent Spring) and finally the co-opting of the
environmental movement to neutralize it and even it turn in
against its original purpose. Chapter Ten, The Tortures'
Lobby, looks at how foreign governments use US PR firms
to shape American public opinion and foreign policy to their
ends. Chapter Eleven, All the News that’s Fit to
Print, explains why we have more PR industry employees
than journalists in the US, and how much of the “news” we see is
produced by PR firms. Chapter Twelve, Taking Back Your
Own Backyard, very briefly describes the condescending
attitude of the PR industry to Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)
movements, and yet shows that they can be successful. Finally,
there are two Appendices and extensive references. Appendix B
is particularly interesting; it is Clorox’s PR Crisis Plan as
obtained by Greenpeace and it describes how they would try to
manage the day when it becomes clear to the public that their
product is harmful.

This book argues that the taboo in the scientific community
against “committing the sin of anthropomorphism” stifles
investigation of animal emotions when lots of data exists. It
is not itself a scientific work, being primarily anecdotal, but
it convincing enough that the burden of proof should be on those
that would argue against animal emotion.

Orwell’s Ministry of Truth rewrote history whenever
it was convenient. This book points out that the United States
does the same for its high-school students, albeit less
frequently (we usually feel comfortable with our myths for
decades). In particular, Lies analyzes twelve
American History high-school textbooks and finds that they
occasionally lie, often invent, and almost always omit key facts
that are critical to understanding American History. The
purpose of these lies and half-truths is to keep our history and
our historical figures heroic and honorable when that was often
not the case. Besides distorting the facts, he shows that the
resulting textbooks are ineffective, making American History one
of the least liked and least learned subject in U.S. schools.
Lies uses examples from many eras of history,
including European exploration of the Americas, contact with
Native Americans, slavery, Helen Keller, the civil rights
movement, and the Vietnam war. Finally, Lies
demonstrates the significant white European bias to our
high-school texts.

The Coming Plague, Newly emerging diseases in a world out of Balance, by Laurie Garret, Farrar Strauss & Giroux.

The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, Random House.

The Media Monopoly, by Ben H. Bagdikian, Beacon Press.

We’ve got a serious problem in the United States: most of our
news and information is comes from media owned by large
corporations and funded by advertising by large corporations.
The result is that we are only allowed to hear part of what we
need to make our democracy effective. This book explores this
situation in depth.

From the back cover: When the first edition of The Media
Monopoly was published in 1983, critics called Ben
Bagdikian’s warnings about the chilling effects of corporate
ownership and mass advertising on the nation’s news
alarmist. Since then, the number of
corporations controlling most of America’s daily newspapers,
magazines, radio, television, books, and movies has dropped
from fifty to ten. This new edition explores the political
implications of this stunning shift, the impact of the
Internet and other new media, and the effects of corporate
media control on the news and entertainment that Americans
see and hear.

Deterring Democracy, by Noam Chomsky, Hill and Wang.

This book looks at United States foreign policy, and argues that
its goal is not the establishment of democracy, freedom, human
rights, or justice, but rather ensuring that the rest of the
world serves our business interests, regardless of the human
toll that this might require. The book looks extensively at the
actions of the U.S. in establishing client states and their
reigns of terror, such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
It also analyzes the invasions of Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf
War.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown, Pocket Books.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, by Paul Kennedy, Random House.

From the cover flap: In this wide-ranging analysis of
global politics over the past five centuries, Yale historian
Paul Kennedy focuses on the critical relationship of economic to
military power as it affects the rise and fall of empires.
Nations project their military power according to their economic
resources and in defense of their broad economic interests. But,
Kennedy argues, the cost of projecting that military power is
more than even the largest economies can afford indefinitely,
especially when new technologies and new centers of production
shift power away from established Great Powers — hence the rise
and fall of nations. Kennedy’s thesis suggests to me that the
U.S. would be better, even militarily, off concentrating on
improving its economic strength, and less on the size of its
military.

The Global Politics of Arms Sales, by Andrew J. Pierre, Princeton University Press.

The Ecology of Commerce, A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken, Harper Collins.

This book details and argues against the environmental crimes of
current industrial society. It isn’t as focused as it should
be, but he does have a vision of how things could be set right,
which makes it well-worthwhile (and besides his vision coincides
with mine). Interestingly, the book points out that the problem
isn’t that we consume too much, it is that we don’t consume
enough.

The Fate of the Elephant, by Douglas H. Chadwick, Sierra Club Books.

The Winner-Take-All Society, by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook.

A look at the problems of winner-take-all markets and the gross
disparities in income that result. While it is fairly obvious
why top athletes, actors, models, CEOs, etc. earn hundreds of
times more than the rest of us, this book also looks at some of
the problems of such systems. For example, enormous differences
in return for relatively small differences in performance lead
to ever escalating attempts for insignificant advantages. They
call these positional arms races, and show how many
current social policies fit the framework of positional arms
control agreements. Their examples remind me of giant
instances of the
Prisoner’s
Dilemma. While classic game theory predicts that
iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas leads to cooperation, it seems that
having a large number of players defeats cooperation, unless
imposed by government action. There is a section on a few ideas
on how to modify the system slightly, but this could use further
development.

The Prize, The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, by Daniel Yergin, Simon and Schuster.

Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. This is simply a history of
oil from the 1850s to modern times, but what a history it is!
The intrigues of corporations and nations, the wars, the
follies, the ironies, it’s all here.

Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen.

Into the Buzzsaw, edited by Kristina Borjesson.

There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, by Jim Hightower.

No one can accuse Hightower of euphemism; he’s clear where
he stands and lets you know it as directly as he can, even
if he dresses it up with a little humor and wit (he loves
the one liner). Hightower is a progressive and his is a
progressive agenda. Even if that’s not your politics, his
book get you thinking about the corporate takeover of our
politicians, media, and heck just about everything else in
our society. Hightower is not an apologist for the
Democrats or Bill Clinton — he’d throw out those bums
with the others — he’s pulling for a party of the
people.

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press.

QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, by Richard P. Feynman, Princeton University Press.

This is an impressive book. It explains QED
(Quantum Electrodynamics), the theory of photons and electrons,
in 120 pages or so (with a little more thereafter about Quantum
Chromodynamics). How is this possible, when it usually takes
several years of graduate school to teach QED? Feynman’s
explanation in the introduction is that he’s going to show us
the concepts without teaching us how to calculate with them
efficiently. His own analogy is of a Maya priest teaching
someone unschooled in Mayan arithmetic about subtraction: to
subtract 236 from 584 you count out 584 beans into a pot and
then take out 236 of them, and then count what’s left to find
out the difference. You wouldn’t want to subtract that way,
but it gives you an idea of what’s going on. Thus his
presentation of QED tells us how we might in theory do the
calculations without showing us the mathematics necessary to
really do it. The purpose is for us to learn both how simple
and comprehensive, and how terribly strange this part of physics
is.

The Symbolic Species, by Terrence W. Deacon.

Recommended

Health

Everything you ever wanted to know about the biochemistry of fat
and especially the Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs).
Erasmus is perhaps a little too enthusiastic about the benefits
of getting enough EFAs in the proper ratio,
but there’s a lot to be learned from his work.

Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman.

The Bread Builders, by Daniel Wing, Alan Scott.

This book is about bread: making it, and making ovens to bake it.
It is technical in places, practical in others, but always a joy
to read. The frequent sidebars talking about wonderful bakeries,
their ovens, their practices, really helped make the book.

Technical

I loved this book. I’ve complained over the years about all the
things wrong with Unix, but I figured I was just a solitary
crank. Now I find I am one of many cranks with similar opinions
about how Unix has set back operating systems by decades. This
handbook goes into great detail on a number of subjects to
illustrate its thesis that the whole Unix philosophy is flawed.

The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth.

As old as this book is, I doubt that it has a peer for the
student of computer science. The mixture of mathematics and
practicality is unique. It is a text that makes you think,
and there is no better way to learn.

This an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the use and
practice of cryptography. By starting with protocols in Part I
rather than encryption algorithms, Schneier gives strong
motivation and background for understanding and evaluating the
algorithms when they are presented in Part III. The book is
clear and easy to read as well.

The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel (Illustrator), Martin Gardner (Introduction).

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

We is an early (1920-21) example of distopia
fiction. The power of its vision puts it on a similar footing
of other great novels in this tradition, including A Brave
New World, with which it is contemperaneous, and the later
1984. When it was published abroad in translation
(it was published in Russia only in 1988), Zamyatin became
unwelcome in the Soviet Union, for which he requested and
received exile.

1984 by George Orwell.

1984 is a distopian vision of the future written as a
warning of what might have been or could be. Most would
consider his work successful, and say that we have thus
far avoided Orwell’s scenario, in part because
his warning was heeded. I believe Orwell predicted more
than he gets credit for, if you substitute corporations
for the government in 1984.

Mind control through propaganda and the rewriting of history
(Orwell’s Ministry of Truth) is an accurate description of
the first world today, where generally accepted beliefs of
society are controlled by a handful of media corporations
in the search of profits and power.
What Orwell missed is that big brother
would be invisible instead of omnipresent and that only
statistical mind control is necessary; absolute mind control
is not attempted. Indeed, Orwell’s Smith is not only allowed
to exist, he is necessary for the mind control to succeed,
as one of the hobgoblin’s to be attacked with propaganda
(for example, the WTO protesters in Seattle were demonized
by the press instead of taken seriously).

Grendel, by John Gardener

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire

Wicked recounts the early lives of the Wizard of Oz characters before
that fateful house arrives, and then briefly covers the events
of its predecessor. While the characters generally follow the Oz
story line once Dorthey arrives, their character and
motivations are very different from the original. Wicked’s
compelling narrative propels us through the story while giving
a completely different perspective on the Witch of the West.
It took a touch of genius to weave a story this well.

Glory Season, by David Brin.

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, Avon Books.

Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, A savage journey into the heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson, Fawcett Popular Library.

The book has impossible energy. It is nominally about a
drug-crazed journalist covering a motorcycle race: completely
implausible, but at the same time a story you can’t put down.
It is like a drug trip, in its initial rocket-like climb into
the stratosphere and the slow descent.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, Fawcett Crest.

A Time to Kill, by John Grisham

The first novel of a best-selling author. This novel was ignored
when it first came out and only garnered attention after
The Firm
was published. However, in my opinion, it is his best book.
His others are far-fetched thrillers, whereas A Time to Kill is
completely plausible.